YOUR CREWS ARE PEOPLE NOW, AND PEOPLE TAKE TIME TO TRAIN.

Hiring used to be instant. In 1.8 it isn't. A type-rated pilot still needs ten days of line training before you can roster them. Hire someone new to the aircraft and they're away on a 45-day type-rating course first — and if the contract school is busy, they wait for a class slot. Every crew also carries a currency clock, and recurrent training comes around whether you planned for it or not. Let it lapse and they can't fly until they requalify, at a premium.

That turns the fleet you can afford into a different question from the fleet you can actually staff. So you have a Chief Pilot now. Capt. Morgan Ellis sits at the top of the Crews tab and tells you, per aircraft family, whether you're genuinely short of people or just waiting on a course to finish — the difference that used to be invisible.

Fly big enough and you can stop renting the schoolhouse. Build your own training centre at an operating hub, add a full-flight simulator bay for a crew family, and your courses run cheaper, finish sooner, and never queue for a slot. It's real capital at real simulator prices — the payback card shows you exactly what it's returning, in fees saved and in crew days handed back to the line.

ONE AIRCRAFT, MANY CITIES

A route no longer has to be two airports. Build a rotation of up to five, pick the aircraft first, tap the cities in order, and it flies the loop and repeats. Each leg earns its own traffic, so a well-built circuit reaches thin markets a there-and-back never could.

Also in 1.8:
• Maintenance moves to its own section under Fleet, where it belongs — Ops keeps just the alerts
• Rival airlines now hub where they really hub. Air France out of Paris, Lufthansa out of Frankfurt and Munich, Copa out of Panama City — 141 carriers, checked one by one
• Buy an airline and you can finally see what it's earning NOW, not the numbers from the day you signed
• Sell-back offers for your hubs and slots are priced off what they actually earn, so a profitable hub is no longer worth a fraction of what you paid
• Ops sections collapse into drawers, and anything needing you wears a red count — with the drawer opening itself when an alert lands inside it
• Transpacific routes cross the Pacific. They used to go the long way round the world
• Aircraft you inherit in an acquisition arrive airworthy instead of grounded on day one
• A round of real performance work: the sim no longer stalls on a large fleet at high speed, and long-running airlines keep syncing across devices